University united aims for the top

TWO Manchester universities united today to become the country's first 'super-university.' Bosses at Manchester University and UMIST have spent months drawing up the plans for the University of Manchester.

TWO Manchester universities united today to become the country's first `super-university.'

Bosses at Manchester University and UMIST have spent months drawing up the plans for the University of Manchester.

And today the countdown - which has been marked with a digital clock above Oxford Road - was finally over when the two became one.

With a total of 30,000 students the new University of Manchester has immediately become the biggest in Britain. It can boast the highest quality and broadest spread of academic research outside the golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London.

And within the next few years the hope is that it will be regarded as one of a handful of the world's elite - attracting students and academics from the four corners of the globe and becoming a centre for world class research.

Vice-chancellor and president Prof Alan Gilbert said: "Around the world students want to go to universities that combine research with high quality teaching and they want a university with a reputation internationally that will stand them in good stead professionally.

Inauguration

"The university is in the top 100 of the world. We feel we can get into the top 25."

Today - when the university's board will meet for the first time - celebrations will be low key.

"October 1 is the key day in the constitutional sense," said Prof Gilbert. "But October 22 will become Founders' Day as a ceremony with the Queen will officially be the inauguration."

Manchester University boasts a major role in the dawn of the nuclear and computer ages, as the place where Rutherford split the atom in 1851 and where Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn ran the first stored programme computer in 1948.

UMIST has links with John Dalton, who developed the atomic theory of matter.

The university dates to 1824, when industrialists launched the Manchester Mechanics Institute, which became UMIST.